A Yogācāra Buddhist Critical Phenomenology

This paper has two goals. The first is to sketch a philosophical basis for a programmatic Buddhist critical phenomenology. The second is to sketch what a programmatic Buddhist critical phenomenology might look like.

The paper defines critical phenomenology along lines outlined by Lisa Guenther in her chapter “Critical Phenomenology”, from the recent volume Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. There, Guenther asserts that critical phenomenology is contiguous with and also advances beyond classical phenomenology. She notes that classical phenomenology already makes one kind of a critique, namely, a critique of the naïve realism that takes it that “the world exists apart from consciousness”, or that the world merely presents, to a transparent perceiving cogito, objects that are independent of the cogito and its modes of perception. Next, Guenther notes that critical phenomenology relies on this critique made by classical phenomenology, and then adds another critique. The new critique of critical phenomenology takes form with the assertion that “contingent but persistent social structures influence our capacity to experience the world, not just in isolated instances but in a way that is deeply constitutive of who we are and how we make sense of things.” That is to say: while classical phenomenology uncovers the transcendental structures that shape all experience, critical phenomenology uncovers the conditioned, historically conditioned structures (like, to name the examples Guenther gives, “patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity”) that shape experience for given beings who occupy distinct stations in social life and shared lifeworlds.

Contemporary Buddhist philosophy has already made contact points with both classical phenomenology and critical phenomenology. In particular, Dan Lusthaus’s volume Buddhist Phenomenology makes a strong case that one of the central insights of the Yogācāra textual tradition in Buddhist philosophy is akin to the overturning of naïve realism performed in Husserl’s phenomenology. For Yogācāra texts, this overturning takes the form of identifying that the “grasper” or “perceiver” or subject of perception and cognition is mutually conditioned by and with the “grasped” or “perceived” or object of perception and cognition. This is equated with the central claim of the Yogācāra school: that the conditioned worlds of experience are “mind only.” Lusthaus gives a fully phenomenological interpretation of this claim, which other scholars have tended to interpret as rather a claim about what kinds of things exist (i.e. mental ones rather than physical ones).

This paper extends Lusthaus’ recognition of Yogācāra as a form of phenomenology in two ways, with the goal of showing how Yogācāra thought may engage with critical phenomenology. First, the paper proposes an interpretation of a pivotally important but understudied set of concepts found in early Yogācāra texts. These texts outline a certain movement or process through which there may occur gnosis that is free from the delusions and bondage. That movement has three steps, and at each of these three steps we find ideas that form the core of Yogācāra thought. The first step is the recognition that there are no objects and that everything is mind only; the second is the entry into mind only; and the third is the achievement of no mind. I argue that this movement of the subject and achievement of gnosis should be understood as articulated within a discipline of thought best understood as metapraxis, a neologism I employ to describe any mode of thought that seeks to expose what must be true in order for it to be the case that delusion, liberation, and the transformative process that leads a being from delusion to liberation, can all obtain. To echo Guenther’s discussion of what classical phenomenology does (uncover the transcendental structures that shape all experience), metapraxis uncovers the transcendental structures that shape delusion, liberation, and the possibility of transformation from delusion to liberation. Metapraxis is particularly important for Buddhist thought because within Buddhist thought, important features of reality that would be treated as proper to metaphysics (using the language of the Western philosophical tradition’s disciplinary categories) actually change depending on whether the subject is bound within delusion or freed from it. In particular, the nature and structure of causal processes—a central concept for the discipline of metaphysics—changes depending on a being’s delusion or liberation. The question that a Buddhist metapraxis seeks to answer is, then, what must pertain such that causation itself can change depending on a being’s level of liberative gnosis? The paper shows that the early Yogācāra metapraxis identifies this particular movement—from naïve realism, to seeing that objects are unreal and there is mind only, to entering into mind only, to achieving no mind—as providing a philosophical basis that shares with phenomenology an overturning of naïve realism and thereby also lays a philosophical groundwork for a programmatic critical phenomenology.

Second, the paper sketches what a Buddhist critical phenomenology might look like. Here the paper argues that the second of the three steps of the “movement” of the Yogācāra metapraxis, the entry into mind only, should be understood as a call for a person/being to occupy their own subjectivity as it unfolds in relation to internal and external objects of perception and cognition, where these include one’s own body, thoughts, feelings, and dispositions, and also one’s relations to other beings, to time and space, and to one’s lifeworld. The movement of the Yogācāra metapraxis is then a basis for a programmatic Buddhist critical phenomenology.

The paper’s sketch of occupying one’s own subjectivity focuses in particular on the way that a Buddhist critical phenomenology would use the language of power quite differently from the broader discipline of critical phenomenology. Whereas the broader discipline of critical phenomenology relies on a kind of materialist understanding in which power is the power to shape one’s world and dispose of oneself and one’s resources as one sees fit (where the possession of such power is of course the feature of what it is to be a non-oppressed being or person), a Buddhist critical phenomenology would precisely identify being privileged in shared social space as a crucial site of ignorance, and therefore a kind of weakness.